Tuesday, 24 September 2013

Syria's senior cleric pardons the rebels who killed his son

The Grand
Mufti of Syria preaches a message of forgiveness

Robert Fisk International/UK 23 September 2013

‘I met those men who assassinated my own
son – and they told me they didn’t even know whom they were killing.” Sheikh
Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the Grand Mufti of Syria, sits in a straightbacked
chair, his immaculate white turban atop a narrow, intelligent and very troubled
face. “He was only 21, my youngest son. On that day, he was to be betrothed to
his future wife. I said to the two men
‘I forgive you’ and I asked the judge to forgive them. But he said they were
guilty of 10 times as many crimes and must be judged.”

“All the men
involved were Syrians, from Aleppo. They said they received their command from
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, that they were each paid the equivalent of £350; Saria
Hassoun’s life was worth a total of just £700.

Sheikh Hassoun is, you might say, government-approved
– he prayed beside Bashar al-Assad in a Damascus mosque after a bomb warning –
and his family, let alone he himself, was an obvious target for Syria’s rebels.
But his courage and his message of reconciliation cannot be faulted. In
whatever new Syria arises from the rubble, Sheikh Hussein should be there even
if his President has gone. And he speaks
with remarkable frankness. When I tell him that I fear the mukhabarat
intelligence service in Syria contaminates all it touches, including the
institutions of government, he does not hesitate for a moment before replying.

“I suffered from the mukhabarat. I was taken from my
post as a preacher from 1972 until 2000. I was taken from my position as Friday
speaker in the Aleppo mosque and from lecturing on four occasions. The
intelligence services all over the world are the same: they never look after
the interest of the human being – they only look after their own institution. And
he asks whether it is not also true that the American intelligence services do
not also spy on Americans and all of Europe, a difficult question – it must be
said – to deny. “Let us put aside the Prophet Mohamed, Jesus and Moses – all
the rest of the world are controlled by intelligence services.”

Unlike most Syrians, the Mufti looks forward rather
than back. He prays for a Geneva 2 conference. “I am the Mufti of all Syrians –
Sunni Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Druze – of all the diversity of sects we
had before the war. There is no choice other than reconciliation; it is the
only way back. But to offer reconciliation, we must eliminate the ‘external
hand’ first.”

“And if the neighbouring countries like Turkey, Iraq,
Saudi Arabia and Lebanon don’t try to make this same reconciliation, the fire
of crisis will flow to them, especially Turkey. For all Syrians, we are open
for them to come back. The problem is those who came from outside Syria –
especially from Iraq and Turkey – who came without visas over smugglers’ trails
either to meet death or to overthrow the authorities here.”

. And on the question of sarin gas, he takes the
government’s side of the story. He quotes Bashar al-Assad as saying he would
never use gas against Syrians - that if he had used it, the war would not have
gone on for two and a half years. The
first major use of gas came in March at Khan al-Assal in Aleppo province, near
the Mufti’s residence, when at least 26 civilians suffocated to death. This is
his version of what happened.

“Some of the farm labourers reported to me that all
the terrorists in the area had suddenly left – the night before the attack –
and had evacuated all their people. So the civilians were happy – they were
civilians and many were the wives and children of soldiers – and so they went
back at last to their homes. Then came the chemical missile attack. I said at
that time, in March, that this event is just an experiment, that gas will be
used again in other places.”

This, of course, is not a story the Americans want to
hear. Five months ago, the Mufti was invited to speak at George Mason and
George Washington Universities in the United States and he travelled to Jordan
for his visa. He says he was asked to go to the US embassy in Amman where he
was interrogated by a woman diplomat from behind a glass screen. “I was so insulted that I decided not to go
and I left for Damascus the next morning.”

The Mufti is a most secular man – he was even once an
Assembly MP for Aleppo. “I am ready to go anywhere in the world to say that war
is not a sacred deed,” he says. “And those who have fought under the name of
Jesus, Mohamed or Moses are lying. Prophets come to give life, not death…. Let
us cease the language of killing. Had we paid all the funds of war to make
peace, paradise would exist now. This is the message of my Syria.”

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About Me

I am not an academic. I have been a commercial beekeeper in New Zealand for most of my working life, except for four years in detention as a conscientious objector during WW2. Those years were particularly formative for me. I have retained my horror of war and the suffering still being caused by armed conflict and violence in so many places. My convictions have been nurtured by my Methodist church connection, though my pacifism has been deplored by some good people.

Expect no slick answers here; I am still a searcher myself. How can a just and peaceful society develop from this chaos, and what are the obstacles in the way?

Most of the articles posted here are from other sources. I look for writers, wherever they can be found, who can throw light on what is happening in our world. If you would like to learn a little more about myself, please read this biographical interview series conducted by my granddaughter, Kyla.